User Friendly comic shows us how to defeat Apple’s DRM scheme using a high-tech toolkit:
img © User Friendly; click to see the original
It’s funny because it’s true. The thing about DRM is that it can never be effective. If you can listen to it or watch it, you can copy it. The only way you can circumvent this is by implanting everyone with encryption chips and pipe the data directly into their brains… And even then, someone is bound to invent a device that will collect the signal based on your electromagnetic brain activity when it leaves the chip. DRM will never, ever work. No matter how effective and hard to break you make it – at some point you must transmit the data in plaintext – otherwise we can’t watch or hear it. And that’s where we can collect it and copy it.
[tags]drm, apple, ecryption, drm tooklit, comic, humor, user firendly[/tags]
good thing i don’t wanna use some store (or cd, fot that matter) which is loaded with drm
my cellphone is my mp3-player :) (sony ericsson, but nothing like some drm, and it supports mp3. good enough for me :))
You can defeat DRM with a cable, but at the cost of sound quaility. When the music is first compressed (to 128-bit AAC), you loose sound quality. If you covert it to audio, you don’t get that sound quality back. In fact, if you compress it again (to MP3, for example), you’ll loose even more sound quality. If all you do is listen to music through cheap earbuds, this double hit isn’t a problem, but if you listen through nice speakers, you’ll definately hear the loss (particularly if you compare it to a CD of the same cut).
Good point. But it doesn’t change the fact that if all you want is to copy music, it will always be possible. You will loose quality but as you said – it doesn’t matter if you are using cheep earbuds. :)